A few of my favourite failures

Or what serial bloopers really taught the author. Authentic, distilled Dilbertian wisdom from the creator of the comic strip

HOW TO FAIL AT ALMOST EVERYTHING AND STILL WIN BIG
Publisher: Portfolio (distributed in India by Penguin)
Pages: 257
Price: Rs 550

I'm delighted to admit that I've failed at more challenges than anyone I know. There's a nonzero chance that reading this book will set you on the path of your own magnificent screwups and cavernous disap­pointments. You're welcome! And if I forgot to mention it earlier, that's exactly where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in fail­ure. It's a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out….

Nietzsche famously said, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." It sounds clever, but it's a loser philosophy. I don't want my failures to simply make me stronger,* which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but it's only barely optimistic. I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier, and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I'm not satisfied knowing that I'll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again.** Failure is a resource that can be managed.

Prior to launching Dilbert, and after, I failed at a long series of day jobs and entrepreneurial adventures. Here's a quick listing of the worst ones…

My Favorite Failures
Velcro Rosin Bag Invention: In the seventies, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty. In college I built a prototype of a rosin bag that attached to a Velcro strip on tennis shorts so it would always be available when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn't patentworthy because it was simply a combination of two existing products. I approached some sporting-goods companies and got nothing but form-letter rejections. I dropped the idea. But in the process I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn't yet know it.

My First Job Interview: It was my senior year at Hartwick College and I started interviewing for real-world jobs. One day Hartwick hosted a career day on campus. The only company that interested me was Xerox. They were looking for two field salespeople. At the time, Xerox seemed like a good company for the long run. I just needed to get my foot in the door with an entry-level sales job and work my way up….

As far as I knew at the time, my interview with the recruiter went well. I explained that I had no sales experience but loved to argue. And what is selling, I asked rhetorically, if not a form of arguing with customers until you win? Yes, I really took that approach.

That failure taught me to look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage. When I later decided to try cartooning, it was because I knew there weren't many people in the world who could draw funny pictures and also write in a witty fashion.

Meditation Guide: Soon after college, a friend and I wrote a beginner's guide to meditation. I had meditated for years and found a lot of benefits in it. We advertised our meditation guide in minor publications and sold about three copies. I learned a good deal about local advertising, marketing, and product development. All of that came in handy later.

Gopher Offer: During my banking career, in my late twenties, I caught the attention of a senior vice president at the bank. Apparently my bullshit skills in meetings were impressive. He offered me a job as his gopher/assistant with the vague assurance that I would meet important executives during the normal course of my work and that would make it easy for him to strap a rocket to my ass - as the saying went - and launch me up the corporate ladder. On the downside, the challenge would be to survive his less-than-polite management style and do his bidding for a few years. I declined his offer because I was already managing a small group of people so becoming a gopher seemed like a step backward. I believe the senior vice president's exact characterization of my decision was "F#@*&G STUPID!!!" He hired one of my coworkers for the job instead, and in a few years that fellow became one of the youngest vice presidents in the bank's history.

I worked for Crocker National Bank in San Francisco for about eight years, starting at the very bottom and working my way up to lower management. That career ultimately failed when I hit the diversity ceiling, but during the course of my banking career, and in line with my strategy of learning as much as I could about the ways of business, I gained an extraordinarily good overview of banking, finance, technology, contracts, management, and a dozen other useful skills. That allowed me to jump ship to a much higher-paying job at...

Phone Company Career: I worked at Pacific Bell for another eight years, mostly doing financial jobs - budgeting and writing business cases for projects. But I also worked as a fake (literally) engineer in a technology lab, and I had a finger in strategy, marketing, research, interface design, and several other fields. That career hit the diversity ceiling just as my banking career had, but in the process I learned a huge amount about business from every angle. And my total corporate experience formed the knowledge base upon which Dilbert was born….

Crackpot Idea Web Site: I like crackpot ideas because I find them inherently interesting, and often they inspire ideas that have merit. I also like coming up with my own crackpot ideas, sometimes several per day…. The site was a subsidiary of Dilbert.com, which had plenty of traffic, so it wasn't hard to get exposure. The problem is that the ideas people submitted were so awful they didn't even rise to the level of crackpot. It didn't take long for the site to be populated with so much well-intentioned garbage that it became worthless. We shut it down.

In the process of failing I learned a lot about Web site design and implementing new features. That knowledge has served me well on several projects.

Video on Internet: During the dot-com frenzy I was approached by the founders of a start-up that planned to allow anyone with a computer to post videos on the Internet for the collective viewing pleasure of all. They asked me to use my Dilbert spotlight to help get the word out. The start-up didn't have much funding, so they offered me a generous chunk of stock instead. I accepted. I talked about the new service in my Dilbert newsletter, posted my own funny videos, and did some interviews on the topic….

Several years later, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and the shareholders made a fortune. Unfortunately, the video service in my story was not YouTube. It was a service that came before. The company I worked with was premature because Internet speeds were not quite fast enough for online video sharing to catch on. The company struggled for a few years and then shut down. YouTube got the timing right. This was about the time I started to understand that timing is often the biggest component of success. And since timing is often hard to get right unless you are psychic, it makes sense to try different things until you get the timing right by luck….

Dilberito: During the busiest years of Dilbert's climb into popular cul­ture, I was often too busy to eat well. I also wanted to give back, as the saying goes, to a world that was being more generous than I thought my meager talent deserved. I came up with the idea of creating a food product that was fortified with 100 percent of your daily requirements of vitamins and minerals. I worked with a food expert, my only employee, who designed a line of burritos - dubbed the Dilberito -and successfully sold them into almost every major grocery chain in the United States, plus 7-Eleven, Costco, and Walmart. In each case the product failed to sell for a variety of reasons, mostly related to shelf placement….

We also didn't do much in the way of repeat business. The mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.

Several years and several million dollars later, I sold off the intellectual property and exited…

First Attempt at Cartooning: My first attempt at professional cartooning involved sending some single-panel comics to the two magazines that paid the most: Playboy and the New Yorker. The comics were dreadful. Both magazines wisely rejected them.
*To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word "stronger" to include anything that makes you more capable. I'd ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn't kill him.

**I should warn you that 75 percent of my analogies involve feces, babies, or Steve Jobs. I do not apologize for that.

Excerpted with permission from Penguin India